"The best tribute that we can pay to Nelson Mandela is to build that struggle in this county."

Members of the People's Organization for Progress march down Broad Street today, honoring the memory of Nelson Mandela by calling on Americans to take up the struggle for equality. Steve Strunsky/The Star-Ledger

NEWARK — Local activists took Nelson Mandela’s legacy to the streets of downtown Newark today, calling on holiday shoppers to carry on the late South African leader’s struggle for equality as part of global fight that had also been taken up by African Americans.

Three dozen members of the People’s Organization for Progress rallied near Newark’s main intersection at the corner of at Market and Broad streets, as the group’s founder, Lawrence Hamm exhorted passers-by and a mostly black crowd gathered around a nearby bus shelter to keep the dream of equality alive. The group then marched west, toward City Hall, carrying signs reading “We Remember Nelson Mandela” and “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

Mandela, the icon with the impish grin who served 27 years in a South African prison for trying to end apartheid before becoming the country’s first democratically elected president in 1994, died on Thursday at age 95.

“Nelson Mandela did all that he could do,” Hamm, bundled against the cold, shouted through a bull horn, noting that poverty, unemployment and other ills still plague many black South Africans after centuries of official and unofficial oppression. "His job was to abolish the apartheid regime and he did that, but the people of South Africa are still suffering,”

“The best tribute that we can pay to Nelson Mandela is to build that struggle in this county, to finish the unfinished work of Martin Luther King, to finish the unfinished work of Malcolm X,” Hamm said.

Some of the people waiting on the corner just after 2 p.m. barely took heed. Others watched and listened until it was time to board their bus.

“I think it makes sense,” 27-year-old Kaydeian Manning, a native of Jamaica who lives in Irvington, said of Hamm’s desire to link the South African and American civil rights struggles. Praising Mandela, she added, “He’s shown us no matter how long it takes, it’s possible as long as you have hope.”